A beginner in lacrosse is considered to be anyone who has been playing the sport for less than two years. Obviously, some children are going to advance quicker than others due to athletic ability and the amount of time they practice on their own. Age is also a factor; a fifteen-year-old is likely to advance faster than an eight-year-old. You can follow the link at the end of this section for a blueprint for training beginners. There is an overview of the basic skills and concepts beginners need to know and provides drills and games that foster the growth of these fundamentals. Finally, there are beginner goals to encourage practice and progress towards the intermediate skill level.

Within the Beginner section, there are a series of pages taking you through everything that you need to know to get started as a lacrosse player. These are skills that even the best players in the world work on, day in and day out. The thing about lacrosse is that, the better you get at it, the more fun it becomes to play. If you can give yourself a strong foundation of all these basic fundamentals, then you are well on your way to becoming a great player!

BEGINNER STICKWORK

Having good stick skills is the single most important area with which to measure a beginner’s progress. Lacrosse is a skill and finesse game. It is a game that gets more fun as one gets better with his stick. When teaching beginners, coaches should concentrate on and find creative ways to make stickwork a part of every drill. Also, beginners should be highly encouraged to work on their sticks as much as possible away from practice. Lacrosse is one of the easiest sports to practice on your own. Individual practice time is a huge indicator of future success for beginning lacrosse players. If a player has a great stick, he can play anywhere on the field at every level.

POSITION SPECIFIC CONCEPTS

In the game of lacrosse, there are four different positions: attack, midfield, defense, and goalie. In a game, there are three attackmen, three midfielders, three defensemen, and one goalie on the field for each team. It is important for beginners to try out all positions to see which one that they like the best and to get a well-rounded perspective of the game. Too many coaches stick kids at one position at an early age and they grow up to be better suited athletically for another position. It is important to teach beginners all aspects of the game while they are first learning. They can decide what position they prefer later. Coaches of young players or beginners should take their whole team through drills that go over general concepts at each position. Furthermore, much of practice should be spent teaching kids fundamentals that apply to all positions. Games and scrimmages can be set up to allow everyone to play the whole field, work at all skills and learn all positions.

Although it is important for beginning players to learn generalized concepts of the game, positions should be taught in their most basic form so the players know what to do in games. While these are some general guidelines of where to put kids, it cannot be emphasized enough to allow your players to participate at all positions. At any age it is a mistake to be overly concerned with winning and losing. Restricting a child to a position that he does not like may turn him off from the game entirely. The main goal in teaching beginners lacrosse should be to show players how much fun the game is, which will hopefully start them off on the right foot and inspire them to work hard in the future. Click the below link to learn more about the positions for beginners.

DRILLS AND GAMES

All of the drills and games are meant to keep things flowing in practice and to ensure that the kids are having fun. Also, there is a tremendous amount of stickwork with emphasis on multiple repetitions in all the practices. Everything in this beginner-training program was designed with the following goals in mind :

1.To teach beginners to catch, throw, scoop and cradle adequately.
2.To show beginners that lacrosse is a fun sport and becomes increasingly more fun as you improve.
3.To teach beginners general team concepts such as staying spread out, creating passing lanes and moving the ball quickly.

These goals were made simple to make sure that coaches do not get too far ahead of the players and instead concentrate on what matters. Trying to set up plays or complicated drills is counterproductive. The concepts, drills, and games that are discussed in this section are most important to beginning lacrosse players. If you stick to this game plan, your team will be successful because their fundamentals will be far superior to other beginner youth teams. You will also be building a solid foundation of skills for your players to improve upon. Lacrosse is a highly skilled and complicated game. Keep things simple for beginners so they do not become intimidated and have fun going to play lacrosse every day. Also, encourage them to take what you teach them in practice and work on some of these things at home. Help them realize that you have to keep your stick in your hand everyday if you want to become a good lacrosse player.